Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T00:25:37.169Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What future for Avebury?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Michael Pitts
Michael Pitts*
Affiliation:
4 Green St. Avebury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, SN8 1RE
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Towards the end of 1989, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Chairman of English Heritage, announced that detailed planning had started on a visitor centre at Stonehenge. For someone not touched by the generations of wrangling over this site, or spared the depressing squalor with which a visit deftly obliterates any preconceptions of mystery or romance, what could be more appropriate than good visitor facilities at one of the world’s top heritage attractions? What could be simpler to construct in an open landscape of not particularly valuable farmland?

Of course, Stonehenge is not like that. This small group of standing stones by a road has provoked one of the most complex, bitter, and long-running archaeo-political stories of all time. It will run and run – make no doubt about that – but Lord Montagu’s announcement has a real significance for anyone with an interest in our past. Someone is actually trying to do something about the place.

Type
Papers
Information
Antiquity , Volume 64 , Issue 243 , June 1990 , pp. 259 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The great complex of Neolithic monuments at Avebury in Wiltshire is, deservedly, a World Heritage Site (FIGURE 1). Avebury is a living village, as well as an ancient monument, and the conflicts between the various interests – of archaeologists, of visitors, of residents – are as acute as anywhere. Michael Pitts knows many of these rôles, as an archaeologist and sometime curator of the Keiller Museum in Avebury, as owner of the splendid Stones Restaurant in the village and publisher of guide-books and postcards, and as an in-coming resident to Avebury. Curiously, as he explains, the future of Avebury seems to depend scarcely at all on a national interest, still less on a world view of the heritage; rather it is the local concerns that will direct it for us all

References

Burl, A. 1979. Prehistoric Avebury. London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Cunnington, M.E. 1931. The ‘Sanctuary’ on Overton Hill, near Avebury, Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine 45: 300–35.Google Scholar
Evans, J.G. 1972. Land snails in archaeology. London: Seminar Press.Google Scholar
Evans, J.G., Pitts, M.W. & William, D.. 1985. An excavation at Avebury 1982, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 51: 305–10.Google Scholar
Gray, H.ST G. 1935. The Avebury excavations 1908-1922, Archaeologia 84: 99–162.Google Scholar
Holgate, R. 1987. Neolithic settlement patterns at Avebury, Wiltshire, Antiquity 61: 259–63.Google Scholar
National Trust. 1976. Avebury Study. Privately published. Google Scholar
Piggott, S. 1950. William Stukeley: an 18th century Antiquary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Piggott, S. 1962. The West Kennet Long Barrow. London: HMSO.Google Scholar
Royal Institute Of British Architects. 1974. Outline proposals o/the Wiltshire Branch of the RIBA/or the protection, improvement and enhancement o/the Avebury stone circles. Privately published.Google Scholar
Smith, I.F. 1965. Windmill Hill and Avebury. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Smith, R.W. 1984. The ecology of neolithic farming systems as exemplified by the Avebury region of Wiltshire, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 50: 99–120.Google Scholar